mausgames

[mausgames]

I've made a simple and short precision platformer where you have to paint your way back to the top. 🦑🎨

You can play it on itch.io in your browser.

The game was made in a couple of so-called Mi'pu'mi days. At Mi'pu'mi on the first Friday every month we are encouraged to use this day to learn new things on our own, stay up-to-date with latest technology or collaborate with others on our own game ideas. On one of those days I decided to do a little game-jam. 🍓

The theme was randomly sampled from Christiaan Janssen's theme generator and turned out to be "Inferno".

Once again I was inspired by Dante Alighieri's Comedia and thought about being one of those unfortunate souls thrown down into hell, trying to get out of it again. The paint mechanic came from the urge to focus more on aesthetics this time and to highlight the difficult path of the player back to the top. It then evolved into sticky walls, which could easily be arranged and modified into many different twists.

After that I also planned to introduce spikes to avoid and coins to collect. I did not finish the spikes as I did not want to restrict the freedom of the player to move around as they like. When the player touched the spikes, the paint would have worked as a rewind mechanic. This is not in the game anymore, but the paint is still used later as a meaningful gameplay element.

Collectibles would have also made a lot of sense as secondary goal and for some kind of scoring system, but again placing them meaningfully would have introduced recommended paths or possible backtracking and I wanted the player to get to the top as freely as possible.

Originally the player should look like an ink blob, but it felt much easier to control and navigate with a silhouette which (literally) highlights the current direction.

The game was made with a custom open-source game engine and the art-style was a bit inspired by Busted Bayou from Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. 🐵

The music is by Tim Beek and arranged in multiple layers. The farther you go up, the more detailed and intense the music becomes. The sound effects are by Jason Steele and I think they sound like punching or slapping someone with a fish. 🐟

Splat textures are by Kenney and the font is by MJType.

As usual the source code is available on GitHub and GitLab.

Have fun!

[mausgames]

Eigengrau was released a year ago and now most of its code and design-documents are public and open-source. 🎂

Feel free to take a look if you are interested in any of the systems or gimmicks. 🐬

You can find everything on GitHub and GitLab.

The game was made with a custom C++ engine, which can also be found there.

I've tried to clean up some of the code and translate all the comments into English, but didn't want to change too much of the original (including hacks and spaghetti code). All the previous snapshots and game versions were submitted separately, so it's easy to compare and see how the code evolved over time.

It's also important to note that the repository should not include any proprietary assets, confidential APIs, private keys or anything similar, so it does not provide the full playable game and might not compile out-of-the-box.

I also went through all my drawings and written records and scanned them in. Some of these may just contain random gibberish, but I wanted to include them anyway for the sake of completeness.

There are also over 1000 screenshots taken over the course of 10 years, showing how the game has changed, how some of the mechanics were prototyped and implemented, how everything was debugged and tested, and what was cut from the final game.

Have fun!

[mausgames]

Eigengrau is now available on the Nintendo Switch eShop! 🎉

A colorful shoot 'em up where every situation, every enemy, and every boss offers a different handcrafted experience.

Nintendo Switch eShop: Americas, Europe, Japan

[mausgames]

Eigengrau will be released on the Nintendo Switch tomorrow and here are some of the Switch-specific features I would like to highlight.

The game runs at 60 FPS and with minimum input latency in both TV mode (1080p) and handheld mode (720p), even with 1000s of bullets on screen. 🚀

The aspect ratio is 1:1, but you can still play Eigengrau vertically in TATE mode and rotate your display or use the Flip Grip. 🙃

The game supports single Joy-Con couch-coop, so it's easy to share the experience with a friend or a family-member. 🫂

Eigengrau will feature Nintendo Switch Online leaderboards. A payed subscription is NOT required to participate, only a linked Nintendo Account and a network connection. 🏆

* leaderboards will be fully available in an upcoming patch 🙇

It was a great experience porting Eigengrau to the Nintendo Switch, and I hope a lot of people will check it out and have fun! ❤️

[mausgames]

This stage is inspired by the "elevator boss" from Sonic the Hedgehog. 🦔

I remember beating this game when I was 4 years old, and today I'm not even able to reach the third zone. 😅

There are only 25 blocks in total in this scene and they get reorder on demand. The blocks were originally cubes, but I had to change them into pyramids, because it looked strange drawing everything else on top due to the perspective projection (though it's also possible to place them deeper, but that made them not look like real obstacles anymore). I also tried adding smoke between moving and shaking blocks, but somehow that distracted and actually reduced visibility.

At least I was able to put an enemy into one of the pillars similar to Robotnik.

The collision detection for this gimmick was quite interesting to implement. The biggest problem was that the player hitbox is actually just a single dot and would be able to fit between blocks, so the detection is done with ray-casts into all 4 directions, checking distances and angles between all objects, and also handling block and player movement to correctly push and crush the player.

I still have plans to open-source the game in the future. Maybe it's interesting for one or the other developer to take a look at it.

[mausgames]

Eigengrau is also inspired by other shmups like R-Type II.

Its rushing ships always looked like big-mouthed fish to me 🐟, but they are actually designed after crustaceans. 🦀

The enemies in Eigengrau also create slow bullet-trails which restrict your movement, and you have to control and navigate through the emerging maze. The bullets needed to be slow and dense, so it's easier to follow the patterns and find holes. It was also important to let player attacks go through already charging enemies, to make it possible to group multiple enemies together without annoying the player too much.

Some enemies get stuck in the screen border and you can finish them off. I really liked that and it later became one of the optional tasks. A lot of enemies, attacks and mechanics in Eigengrau interact with the screen border and I hope it feels like an interesting twist to the regular scrolling gameplay.

The gimmick of this stage is not really that complex and so it made sense to put it into the first mission and prepare the player for the things to come.

[mausgames]

The mischievous moles from Ōkami provided the next inspiration. 🐺

I had a lot of fun running around as Amaterasu, but I still have no idea how that mini-game is supposed to work. 🤷

For the implementation in Eigengrau I wanted it to be more comprehensible and deterministic, as this is quite essential for a shoot 'em up.

Finding cool movement patterns was fun, but it was also important that enemies move clear and consistently.

It can become very hard to see enemy movement and bullets at the same time, so simplifying the background helped a lot to improve visibility.

Even though the real target should stand out visually and the player onboarding should introduce the objective (hopefully), it was still hard to understand what to actually hit in this stage when playing it for the first time, so I later added additional visual and acoustic cues to improve clarity (crosshair, success/failure jingles).

This is one of the shortest stages in the game, but it can be very intense, as the enemies attack as fast as you attack them.

[mausgames]

This gimmick was inspired by D/Generation, though it works a bit different in Eigengrau. 🟩

I once watched my friend Tova play the game and wanted to see how this would feel in a shoot 'em up. 🙈

Placing the fields at fixed positions felt way too easy and mundane for a shmup and so I thought it was important to move them around and keep the player active. It then became crucial to give all fields the same size and speed so that the player is able to properly estimate their locations. The permanent harmfulness helped to avoid some unfair situations by making sure the player stays away.

Though in some situations it was still quite hard to keep track of everything, so the twists and enemy patterns had to be on the lighter side compared to other stages. I still had fun spinning everything around, hiding enemies, or arranging the fields like tetrominos.

This is another gimmick which does not directly appear in the boss fight, but is later remixed with some other gameplay elements.

[mausgames]

The gimmicks in Eigengrau were inspired by a lot of different games, genres and memories. One of my favorite inspirations was Bomberman. 💣

I played many different Bomberman games when I was still younger and always liked the elegance of the bomb mechanic.

In Eigengrau it was really hard to see and attack regular enemy groups through all those explosions, so I decided on a single highlighted enemy which needs to explode multiple times, fitting the theme. Enemy and bombs spawn relative to the ship position and force the player to keep moving. Properly indicating where and when the explosions will occur made it much easier and intuitive to dance around and focus on the enemy.

This is one of the few gimmicks which does not directly appear in the boss fight.

[mausgames]

Made another new weapon for the next update. With it you can shoot into multiple directions at the same time. ⚔️

It's a bit weaker per side, but allows for massive damage in risky situations. 😤

At least one more weapon is planned, but I want to focus on other features first, like online leaderboards, a new difficulty level, and a new platform.

Especially that last one is very exciting for me, as it is a great opportunity to learn a lot of new things.

[mausgames]

The volcano area Gelu (cold ❄️) and snow area Calor (heat 🔥) have their names swapped.

Originally they were alternate routes, and when I made them sequential I accidentally mixed up their names. 🥴

I decided to keep it that way, as I found it more interesting.

All the area names in the game are from Latin, except for the underwater area Nevo which is a made-up word based on Captain Nemo. (though I'm pretty sure it has a meaning in some languages)

[mausgames]

YouTube: Eigengrau

New #YouTube Upload!

Eigengrau

[mausgames]

Hello, my name is Martin. I'm a programmer from Vienna, Austria, with interests in computer graphics, engine programming and game development.

For the last couple of years I've been working on a colorful shoot 'em up called Eigengrau, which was recently released on Steam, itch.io and Epic Games Store. It was made with a custom open-source game engine.

I'm still improving and porting the game, and would like to post progress, fun-facts and news about its development here. I'm also on Mastodon and Bluesky, but maybe I can extend some of the posts here or even start writing about other topics, like programming, reading, gaming and new projects.

Thank you! 🙂